Over the past year and a half, we’ve discussed scene description several times:
Screenwriting and the present tense
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense: Good ‘poetic’ writing
Capitalization in scene description
Butch Cassidy: One way to write an action scene
Screenwriters confront a challenge with scene description. On the one hand, movies are primarily a visual medium and it is scene description that conveys a script’s visuals and action. On the other hand, script readers will, if pressed, scan scene description and focus on dialogue. Why? Dialogue has narrower margins and, thus, can be read faster – a big deal if you’re a reader under a deadline to turn in coverage and/or you’ve got several scripts in your to-read stack. And you can pretty much track what’s going on just by reading dialogue.
So a conundrum: Scene description is critical in conveying a movie’s visuals and action, yet a script reader will often carry a conscious (or unconscious) prejudice against paying close attention to it.
Which results in a few principles re writing scene description:
* No more than 5 lines per paragraph of scene description [better yet, 3 lines]
* Think of scene description more like poetry than prose
* You do not need to use complete sentences in scene description
* Use visual descriptors
* Use strong verbs
* Aim to create a visceral sense of place, mood, and feel
Here’s a mantra that pretty much sums it up: “Minimum words, maximum impact”.
In that spirit, check out this scene description:
Pete cruised in slow. He wore the sap. He held his automatic. He saw:Dirt streets. Dirt yards. Dirt lots. Shack chateaus abundant.
Tar-paper pads with cinder-block siding. Beaucoup churches/one mosque.
ALLAH IS LORD! signs. Allah signs revised to JESUS!Lots of street activity. Jigs cooking bar-b-que in fifty-gallon drums.
Shouts overlapped–more rebop/more jive. Pete yelled. Pete displayed
charisma. Pete restored calm.
Visual. Lean. Punchy. Conveys a sense of place, mood, feel. And easy to read.
Good scene description, right? Except it’s from a novel: “The Cold Six Thousand” by James Ellroy.
In this most recent 14 Days of Screenplays challenge, I was struck by how good the scene description was, especially in the more contemporary scripts: The Crying Game, (500) Days of Summer, Wall-E, Aliens, Little Miss Sunshine. Since screenwriting boils down to scene-writing, and scenes are almost always dominated by scene description, I thought it would be interesting to keep an eye out for good examples of scene description over the next few weeks.
So as you read screenplays, novels, short stories, even poems, make a note of particularly good scene description. Once a week or so, I’ll start a thread inviting everyone to post those examples in comments – to help inspire us to write strong, compelling, and vivid scene description, the best way to keep a reader engaged in the visual aspect of the scripts we write.
Feel free to start in comments here with any of your favorite screenplay scene description.
Great stuff Scott,
My current area of focus in growing as a screenwriter IS writing better lines of description.
Quick question, AND it's something I saw in the most recent "14 Days of Screenplays" how does a writer rationalize ending a line of description with a colon?
Pete cruised in slow. He wore the sap. He held his automatic. He saw:
Straight out of the "Harbrace College Handbook" you use a colon as a "formal introducer to call attention to what follows and as a mark of seperation in scriptural and time references and in certain titles."
Anyway if you'd be so king so as to justify the use of colon (:) at the END OF A LINE OF DESCRIPTION IN SCREENWRITING I'd be much obliged.
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
E.C.:
But seriously…
Most people don't look at screenwriting as an exercise that adheres to the rules of grammar as in essay-writing, for example. It is closer to the oral tradition. Therefore, it's conversational, and it's leading. The narrative must move the reader, and any technique that does so is fair game for use.
@E.C.
Your answer is in the formal definition you gave us. "to call attention to what follows ". In the example Scott gave us what follows the colon?
" Dirt streets. Dirt yards. Dirt lots. Shack chateaus abundant." Almost like poetry the way Elroy strings the consonants together. Easy, even satisfying to read and Visual…just what a reader wants.
Humble advice: don't get caught up in the grammatical rules of usage too much. Just tell the story. You get that, editing grammar will be easy.
Lee Matthias and Just_Hitz,
Thanks for the repsonse. Great feedback.
I just want to understand everything as pertains to screenwriting format. That's why I post questions like that. In the time I've been writing I've noticed a WIDE difference in form writer-to-writer. Bolded vs non-bolded master shot heading for instance, which was discussed in an earlier post.
Believe me, I'm not a big rules guy. If those writing the checks, and those grading in screenwriting competitions allow for varriances, I'm not going to complain. I just want to know what's acceptable and what isn't.
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
@E.C.: Lee and Just_Hiltz have it right by my view. When writing scene description, it's our job to entertain the reader (I'm talking about a selling script, not a shooting script). And if we need to break the rules of grammar to do it, so be it.
We need go no further than the dean of contemporary American screenwriting William Goldman who once wrote an action sequence [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] as a 250+ word run-on sentence and made up the word "barrel-assed" as a verb in scene description — all in the service of creating a visual and compelling narrative.
Like Lee said: "The narrative must move the reader, and any technique that does so is fair game for use."
And like what JH said: "Humble advice: don't get caught up in the grammatical rules of usage too much. Just tell the story. You get that, editing grammar will be easy."
Can I recommend Casino as a script to read? I know it’s on dailyscript.com. Scorcese, DeNiro and Pesci obviously bring tons of energy to the table, but just read the first few pages of that script and see how wildly engaging it is.